September 30th 2025
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WellBeing Magazine
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Near-death experiences challenge our view of consciousness, revealing vivid perceptions and lasting change across cultures.
A seven-year-old girl — we will call her Alina — was gravely ill in a children’s hospice. She had been blind since birth and was battling a rare form of leukemia. Following a severe fever that led to a brief cardiac arrest, she was successfully resuscitated.
A few days later, Alina began to calmly and matter-of-factly describe what she had seen. She spoke with startling precision about the room she had been in: the curtains, the machines, the colours of her nurse’s clothing. She said she had seen herself lying there and that, “for the first time, I could look at everything with my own eyes”.
She also spoke of a light that “didn’t blind me — it touched me”. She described a warmth, a voice without words, telling her she could choose to stay. In the final weeks of her life, despite all physical suffering, she radiated calm and trust.
Experiences like hers are difficult to explain within conventional neurological or psychological frameworks. They challenge our assumptions about perception, identity and consciousness.
Death is omnipresent yet almost invisible
It unfolds behind closed doors, in sterile rooms, surrounded by machines and medical professionals.
As modern medicine fights to preserve life at any cost, there is little room left to ask what it truly means: to live and to leave.
And yet those who have come closest to dying often return with stories that challenge our conventional understanding of consciousness. Near-death experiences, reported from emergency rooms, intensive-care units and hospices, tend to follow a strikingly consistent pattern: a profound sense of peace, encounters with light, reunions with the deceased, an out-of-body perspective and an inexplicable certainty that consciousness continues beyond the physical body.
The phenomenology of near-death experiences
Despite individual differences, near-death experiences (NDEs) tend to follow a remarkably consistent structure. Across age, gender and cultural background, people describe similar elements: a deep sense of peace and detachment, an out-of-body perspective, the passage through a tunnel or threshold, encounters with beings of light or loving presences, panoramic life reviews of stunning clarity and often, reunions with deceased loved ones.
Many describe these experiences as “more real than reality”. Some speak of boundless knowledge or profound insight into the deeper structure of existence. Strikingly, these reports emerge not only in Western societies but also in accounts from Asia, Latin America and the Arab world, with local variations yet with a shared underlying architecture.
Cardiologist Pim van Lommel, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson and others have studied these accounts in detail. Based on the Declaration for Integrative, Evidence-Based, End-of-Life Care that Incorporates Nonlocal Consciousness from 2015, van Lommel notes:
“The existence of a nonlocal aspect of consciousness that is not wholly dependent on the brain is not limited to specific points in space and time and does not cease to exist with physical death.”
Greyson adds:
“Retrospective assessments by near-death experiencers themselves and by their significant others describe NDEs as life-transforming, leading to profound changes in attitudes, beliefs and behaviours.”
This remarkable cross-cultural consistency suggests that near-death experiences may not be mere subjective fantasies but rather glimpses into universal processes of consciousness that science has yet to fully understand.
Neuroscientific perspectives
Neuroscience has made remarkable progress in recent decades. Technologies such as electroencephalogram (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) now provide detailed insights into the brain’s activity patterns. Many researchers maintain that consciousness arises entirely from neural processes — a product of chemical signalling, electrical impulses and evolutionary refinement.
Accordingly, near-death experiences are often framed as the byproduct of extreme physiological conditions such as oxygen deprivation in the brain, surges of endorphins or DMT or unusual electrical activity in the temporoparietal junction. These explanations can appear convincing, especially when viewed through the lens of a model in which consciousness is thought to reside solely within the brain.
Significant questions remain. Why do some people report NDEs while others under virtually identical medical conditions do not? How is it that individuals recall verifiable events that occurred while they were clinically unconscious, according to hospital records? And why do these experiences so often lead to lasting transformations?
These dimensions are difficult to explain through neurobiology alone. They suggest that NDEs may be more than just a byproduct of a dying brain — perhaps glimpses into a realm of consciousness that is not entirely reducible to neural activity.
As Dr Sam Parnia, a leading researcher in resuscitation medicine, states:
“While unrecognized, people undergoing CA [cardiac arrest] may have consciousness, awareness and cognitive experiences despite absent visible signs of consciousness.”
His findings open new questions about how and where consciousness originates and whether it might survive the boundaries of clinical death.
Quantum and philosophical approaches
Could it be that consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon of brain activity but a primary feature of the universe just as fundamental as space, time or energy? This question does not lead us into mysticism, but into a domain of open inquiry where physics and philosophy begin to converge.
That at the most fundamental level not everything consists of fixed objects but of probabilities, relationships and information flows has been shown by quantum physics. The state of a particle remains undefined until it is measured — until an act of observation collapses the wave function into something tangible. Some interpretations, like those proposed by physicist John Archibald Wheeler, speak of a “participatory universe”, in which the observer is not outside the system but an integral part of its unfolding.
Then there is the impressive phenomenon of non-locality, the realisation that entangled particles can influence each other over any distance, which contradicts the classical notions of cause and effect. Such ideas suggest that reality may not be entirely governed by linear causality and that consciousness could be not a mere reflection of the world but a fundamental aspect of it.
Philosophy has long offered parallel visions. Thinkers such as William James (neutral monism) and Bernardo Kastrup (analytical idealism) who can be seen as proponents of panpsychism — the view that consciousness exists in some form in all matter — have explored these questions deeply. Physicist David Bohm proposed the idea of an “implicate order”: a hidden, holistic dimension from which all visible reality unfolds, in which matter, mind and meaning are inseparably entwined.
They invite us to reconsider the essence of being alive, of being conscious and of being in connection with others, with ourselves and perhaps with something beyond us. Near-death experiences call us to pause not as a retreat from life but as an invitation to embrace it more deeply. They remind us of what truly matters: not material possessions or accomplishments but presence, authenticity and love.
These stories may not provide definitive answers. Yet they open a space where deeper questions and, with them, deeper understanding can begin to take root.
What we can learn
Near-death experiences are not proof, nor do they aim to be. They are stories from people who briefly stepped beyond the familiar frame and touched something that defies language. Speaking with those who have had a near-death experience, one thing becomes clear: these events are not something you can simply “explain away”. They leave a deep imprint, often lasting for years.
Many report that their attitudes toward life, death and relationships shift in profound ways. Fear — especially the fear of dying — tends to recede. In its place, values such as compassion, mindfulness, spiritual curiosity and a renewed sense of inner purpose come to the forefront. People leave behind careers, become socially engaged or discover forms of creative expression that previously lay dormant.
Their self-image often changes as well. Those who experienced consciousness during a moment of clinical “nothingness” begin to see themselves not only as bodies or biographies. Many people describe feeling more awake, more aware and, at the same time, more humble in the face of what cannot be fully explained.
Yet despite their depth and consistency, these experiences are often shared only in private. Out of fear of being dismissed, misunderstood or labelled irrational, many individuals remain silent. But those who do speak often do so with a sense of clarity.
Their stories may not offer final answers, but they open spaces for reflection, curiosity and deepened inquiry. Spaces where we might begin to rethink what it means to be human.
References upon request.
Article Featured in Wellbeing 218
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